ZigBee Alliance Triples in Size

maxstreampr writes "The ZigBee Alliance just put out a press release talking about how they tripled in size in the past year. I know, I can see the posts already. "What up to 3 members now." There are actually 124 members and they have some huge players in Phillips, Freescale, Samsung, and MaxStream. Not too shabby." See this story from December for more on ZigBee; in short, it's a low-data-rate wireless standard "to enable wirelessly networked monitoring and control products."

Real World?

[MBCook]

So, is this out in the real world?

I mean, sure there are products (they probably showed them at the recent CES). But has anyone actually USED anything that has ZigBee in it? Is there some product that's "easy to find" (not horrifically obscure) that's available? Has anyone used ZigBee it's self or developed for it so they could give us impressions of it?

I mean it's interesting and all, but so was DataPlay (and we all know how many things with DataPlay we have in our houses).

Re:Real World?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see this as the target of ZigBee. The real place for this is in industrial wireless networking. Cheap, low-power sensors that need to last much longer than they could possibly last on 802.11b or Bluetooth.

Basically, consumers aren't going to see much from this. This is going to be deployed in industrial plant monitoring, HVAC monitoring and similar situations where wiring is a cost issue.

Zigbee Products are here

[greencarp]

I've got a number of zigbee products in my lab for sensor net research. You can get them...

http://www.xbow.com/Products/productsdetails.aspx? sid=101 [xbow.com]
http://www.moteiv.com/ [moteiv.com]

Whatever

[horza]

Another wireless attempt. I want to set up a Home Automation system, yet things don't seem to have moved on since 20 years ago. You have a few wireless options, which I'm not interested both for security and as I have a lot of appliances that generate a lot of RF. X10 is slow and unreliable. The Clipsal CBUS is a nice idea but a patented monopoly and stupidly expensive. There are some nice USB capture devices such as labjack, minilab, etc but Linux support is poor. There are embedded computers but those with Ethernet are too expensive. There are a few RS485 options though. I was hoping some XaP devices would appear, PIC based, but Xap has turned into some crap WinXP desktop app. DMX isn't appropriate really. I'm going to have to come up with some homebrew solution, currently thinking of using Micromint PicStic which appears better for home control than the Gumstix, but it's going to reduce the resale price of my flat if I don't use a supported off-the-shelf solution :-(.

The state of HA today is a sad mess. I really am disappointed.

Phillip.

Re:Erm... Important how?

[lakiolen]

http://www.moteiv.com/ has a picture of the latest and (we like to say) greatest mote that is out there on their front page.
http://www.xbow.com/Products/productsdetails.aspx? sid=3 also talks about wireless mesh networking hardware and software
http://www.tinyos.net/related.html linked from PROJECTS USING TINYOS (caps not mine) under Community on the right hand side of the site lists a bunch of real projects using tinyos and mote hardware.
http://www.tinyos.net/faq.html linked from FAQ under Help on the right again talks about what tinyos is.

I think that's what you're looking for but if not let me know and i'll supply you with more info.